I’ve always said, a good sign that you’ve chosen a good niche on the Internet is that your ‘regular’ friends don’t understand what you do. Yesterday my church pal Dave says, “You do something related to computers or the Internet, right? What is it that you do anyway?”

“I write books and courses on how to buy web traffic. I teach my customers how to get more money out of the clicks than what it cost to buy them.”

From the look on his face, he still has no idea what I’m talking about. Except that it has something to do with making money on the Internet.

He says, “I get these emails all the time about working from home and making money online. Are those legit?”

“They’re all probably *somewhat* legit but I wouldn’t touch 90% of them with a 10 foot pole.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because they only tell you about 1/4 of what you really need to know to make it work.”

“Make WHAT work? I still don’t get what you do?”

I ask him if he’s ever noticed the ads on Google.

He doesn’t know what I mean by ‘ads.’ So I explain how the right side of Google works. (About half the people I talk to are quite surprised to find out that every time someone clicks on the right-side, Google whacks somebody for 50 cents or a buck.)

“So how do people make money? Like with these emails I get all the time?”

I explain affiliate programs and all that. I say, “Let’s say Amazon sells Weber Grills for $400 and they pay 8% commission which is $32. If you can buy enough traffic for $20 to get someone to buy then you make $12 profit.

Now he’s starting to get interested. “Wow, this is almost like stocks or futures or something.”

“Yeah, it’s a lot like stocks or futures. Except it’s clicks.”

I continue: “But it’s real competitive and it’s hard to do that. Cuz the traffic might cost $50 and then people lose money.”

“But on the other hand if you go to China and source Grills for $85 and sell them for $400, you’ve got $315 to buy traffic with. Then it gets a whole lot easier. But importing grills from China is a more complicated business.”

He says, “So does this really work?’

“You can make it sound a lot easier than it really is,” I say. “But there’s another side to the coin. Most of the people selling the make-money aren’t trying to rip people off. They’re just trying to deal with the fact that most people are lazy and if you tell them what it really takes, they’ll never do anything. So they have to make it sound easy.”

“So it’s not easy?”

“If you have a deep enough bag of tricks, it’s easy. If you don’t, you constantly find yourself putting $1.00 in and getting 50 cents out. Like stocks real estate or anything else. The thing about the Internet is, you can try lots of experiments in a very short period of time.”

“So how many people make a lot of money doing this?” he says.

“As a guy who teaches people how to do stuff, I can tell you that only about 5% do everything you tell them to do. The rest of ’em skip a bunch of steps and wonder why it never quite seems to work. So…. about 5% of ’em do really well. It’s not ALWAYS the same as the 5% who do everything, but it’s pretty close.”

I told him, “If the business opportunity pitchmen explained everything people were going to need to know to master online marketing, some of them might just decide to go to medical school instead.”

Then I thought about my friends who are doctors. “Actually, selling on the Internet is w-a-a-a-a-a-y easier than medical school though, believe me.”

I’m serious about only 5% doing what they’re told. Last week I consulted with a guy whose manufacturing business did quite well up to this year, but the competition has stiffened considerably.

Because all his competitors are fighting for their very life. Clicks have almost doubled. And if the trend continues he’ll be out of business by January. I asked him a ton of questions and found out:

• He’s not split testing landing pages (he can EASILY improve by 10% with a few early tests)
• 2/3 of his business is over the phone and he’s not using any kind of telephone call tracking (he can EASILY cut 20% of waste by doing this – if not more)
• He just started using Google Ad Extensions (multiple landing page links in the premium listings) and his CTR instantly jumped from 5% to 9%

I told him: “Dude, you’re at a fork in the road. If you do all this stuff half your competitors will be out of business in a year, and you can buy their customer lists and equipment.”

Like I told my friend Dave, he can be in the top 5% if he wants to be. Fork in the road.

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

Perry Marshall

Join me in Texas in November, practically for free:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/mastermind

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.